Four Walls

15

MAC TAYLOR HAD SPENT last night alone.

There was a time when that wouldn't have been unusual. Since September 2001, after the loss of his wife, Claire, and so many others, he'd had to adjust to sleeping alone, on those rare occasions when he could sleep.

After five years, though, he found himself at last able to take someone else to his bed. Peyton Driscoll was someone he'd always liked and admired back when she had served as ME, and when she returned to the job a year ago, Mac had found that he liked and admired her even more. And then he found out that the feeling was mutual.

It had been a difficult road for Mac-and for Peyton, who had gone into the relationship knowing that she had competition from a ghost. Plus it seemed that the only feelings Mac had been able to tap into these days were negative ones: anger, frustration, vindictiveness. Others-humor, tenderness, affection, and yes, love-those were harder to come by.

When Stella had been attacked by her ex-boyfriend and forced to shoot him, Mac had been there for her as best he could. He had worked the scene, and he had taken her home. But he hadn't been able to be there for her emotionally-that had fallen to Flack. Mac couldn't even be there for himself emotionally, so how could he help Stella? The answer was by doing his job and letting Flack, who was better equipped to handle emotional breakdowns, be the shoulder to cry on.

Peyton was slowly reminding him how to do that. That didn't mean he didn't occasionally roll over expecting to see Claire there, and it didn't mean that he had gotten rid of the one item of hers he had kept (a beach ball she'd blown up, because it still held her breath), and it didn't mean he could fly over lower Manhattan (as he'd done on the way back from Staten Island yesterday) without a cold, icy hole opening in his stomach.

But he was getting there.

However, last night, Peyton had begged off their date because she wanted to make sure that the Barker autopsy was done properly. She anticipated exhaustion upon completion, so she went home, leaving Mac to sleep alone.

Or, at least, lie awake alone.

His first thought when he sees the report on channel 5 that a plane hit one of the WTC buildings is fear. Claire works in World Trade, and after a horrible accident like that, evacuating would be difficult. Still, after the bombing in 1993, the occupants of the Twin Towers had evac plans in place. Mac tries to call Claire, but he can't get through at her office or on her cell. The towers and phone lines are probably overloaded. Besides, it's just an accident, nothing to worry about.

That thought remains right until the second plane hits.

Up until then, this is a tragedy, a horrible accident, a plane going horrendously off course.

When the second plane hits, everything changes.

It's like a switch is thrown. Now it's no longer an accident-it's an attack.

Mac Taylor feels the change in his gut, the instincts of a detective, the instincts of a Marine. But in his heart there is still only one thought: Claire.

He will spend that entire horrible Tuesday trying to find out if she survived.

He will never hear from her again.

The memories were always there, but today-when the chopper to and from Staten Island had flown over Ground Zero-they were particularly intense.

Almost six full years later, and it was still a hole in the ground. They still hadn't recovered all the remains, and the remains they had found had yet to all be identified. Mac had no idea if finding Claire's genetic material on the site would make a difference to him. Was there a part of him still holding on to the possibility that she was alive somewhere?

It was ridiculous, of course. Mac was a rationalist, through and through, and there was simply no way that Claire would have stayed away all this time if she had survived, no matter what she might have gone through. She definitely died when the towers collapsed.

But why was there a part of Mac that held on? It was hard to say. Mac had been working murders for years now, and if he'd learned one thing in all that time it was that everyone reacted differently to the death of a loved one.

This morning, he came into the lab alone, cup of coffee in hand, only to find Peyton waiting in his office, along with Sheldon and Deputy Inspector Gerrard.

Opening the glass door to his office, he said without preamble, "I'm going to go out on a limb here and say this is about the Barker case."

"I'm afraid so," Peyton said. Her apologetic tone set the mood for Mac: something had gone wrong, or at least sideways.

Peyton simply handed him the autopsy report. Mac flipped through it, then looked back up at her. "Anaphylactic shock?"

"That's my medical diagnosis, yes. The head wound was postmortem, which is why it bled so little."

"So how'd it happen?"

Sheldon stepped forward. "I actually have a theory on that, Mac. I haven't tested it out yet, but-"

"Then it's a hypothesis," Mac said, setting the report down on his desk. He walked around it, briefly looked at the view of Broadway out his large window, then sat in his leather chair. "Once you test it successfully, then it becomes a theory."

Hands on hips, Gerrard said, "Can we have grammar class some other time, please?"

Mac shot Gerrard an annoyed look, then said, "Go ahead, Sheldon."

"We found a thread on Washburne's shoulder, one that Adam identified as coming from RHCF prison dickies-but from the pants, not the shirt."

"So how'd it get on his shoulder?"

"My guess," Sheldon said, "is somebody bumped him when Barker got stabbed. Let's say he was lying on the weight bench when he went into anaphylactic shock. He could've died right there while lying down and nobody would've noticed."

"You think they'd miss that?" Gerrard asked.

"It's possible," Peyton said. "He stopped breathing when his throat closed up. He'd only be able to make incoherent whispery grunts."

Mac nodded. "Which wouldn't be all that different from the sounds people would be making while lifting weights."

Sheldon continued. "Besides, he had to have been dead for a few minutes before he got hit on the head in order for the wound to have had so little bleeding. Now when Barker got stabbed, it was chaos in there. Maybe someone bumped up against Washburne's body, knocking him off the weight bench, hitting his head on the weight hard enough to cause the gash and also knock the weight onto the ground."

Gerrard now folded his arms over his chest. "It's also possible that Melendez took the weight off the bar and hit Washburne over the head with it, not realizing he was already dead."

"I've met the man," Mac said, "and I can't say with a straight face that he wouldn't be that stupid."

"I'll run some simulations," Sheldon said, "see which scenario fits the evidence."

"All right," Gerrard said, "then what did Washburne react to?"

"That's the problem," Peyton said. "I haven't the foggiest. All his stomach contents were long digested, so it couldn't have been something he ate. The tox report only showed Klonopin. According to his prison record, he's been taking Klonopin since his trial, so it couldn't have been that."

"People develop allergies as they get older," Gerrard said. "When I turned forty, I suddenly became allergic to powdered detergents."

Peyton shook her head. "It's possible, but there would have been a sign of it. According to the prescriptions in prison records, Malik Washburne was taking one hundred milligrams of Klonopin every day for almost a year. That violent an allergy doesn't develop overnight."

Mac's Treo rang in his suit jacket. Pulling it out, he saw it was Flack. He put the call on speaker and said, "Don, it's Mac-I've got you on speaker with Peyton, Sheldon, and Inspector Gerrard."

Flack's tinny voice said, "I just got off the phone with Ursitti. Seems somebody beat the crap out of Jorge Melendez."

"What? Why?"

"Ursitti tells me that it's retribution for Washburne's death."

Gerrard said, "How the hell did anyone there know Melendez was a suspect?"

"That's the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, Inspector. I'm headin' back there now," Flack said.

"I'll meet you there," Mac told him.

"I'm stuck in traffic on the BQE, so you'll probably beat me there."

Mac looked at Gerrard, who said, "You will-you can have the chopper again."

"Thanks." He looked down at the phone. "I'll see you there, Don."

After hanging up, he looked at Sheldon. "You and Danny do a re-creation, see if you can figure out exactly how Washburne would've received his wound and gotten onto the ground."

"On it," Sheldon said, and left.

Before Mac could say anything else, Peyton said, "I'll run some more blood tests, see if we can find something exotic that a standard tox screen wouldn't find." He nodded in thanks, and Peyton also took her leave.

That left Mac and Gerrard in the room together, which wasn't particularly comfortable for either man. Though Mac found he didn't give a good goddamn what was comfortable for the deputy inspector.

"Can I help you with something else, Stan?"

"That's 'Inspector Gerrard,' Detective Taylor. You lost the right to use my first name when you stabbed me in the back."

"I stabbed you in the back?" Mac was incredulous. "I wasn't the one who sicced Internal on me after the DA had already cleared me!"

"Yeah, and neither was I-that was Sinclair. I was the one who did you the courtesy of meeting with you and informing you of the investigation. Sinclair didn't even want that much-he would've been happy for you to hear about it on New York 1 with the rest of the city, but I thought you deserved the consideration of a face-to-face. Your response to this courtesy was to insult me, and then, when you felt like the hearing wasn't going your way, you decided to dig up dirt on me." Gerrard stepped forward and leaned over Mac's desk, his palms flat on the wood surface. "If you think for a second that I'm going to forget what you did to me, Detective, you are sadly mistaken. From here on in, I'll be taking permanent residence up your rectum, and you'd better for damn sure walk straight and fly right. That goes for your usual gang of idiots out there, too. If Messer goes whacko again, if Monroe bolts a crime scene-yeah, I know about that-or if you decide to go vigilante again, I will be there with a giant hammer, and I will use it to nail your ass to the wall."

Gerrard seemed to think that was a good exit line, because he chose that moment to walk toward the door. Then he stopped and turned around. "Washburne was a member, Mac. Do right by him."

"That was always my intention," Mac said tightly. "Is there anything in my history that suggests I'd do otherwise?"

"Six months ago, I'd have said no, but now? Now you're going around threatening the chief of detectives. That's a special kind of stupid, Mac. I don't want you to screw up, but if you do, you will pay for it. Oh, and one more thing-you said you were getting the hang of playing politics, but politics is like poker. You don't show your hand till all the betting's in."

"The betting was in, Inspector," Mac said angrily. "You and Sinclair were railroading me."

"How do you know? The investigation wasn't over yet. How did you know you wouldn't get the same get-out-of-jail-free card the DA gave you?"

Not buying the notion for a second, Mac said, "Was that likely to happen?"

Gerrard smiled. "Oh, I could tell you, Mac-but that would be doing you a favor. I'm not inclined to do favors for detectives who blackmail me. So I'll just let you stew on that one and remind you that I know what you have in your hand now."

Then Gerrard finally left.

Mac turned his chair around and stared out the window. He looked at the cars moving slowly down Broadway. It was a long drop from Mac's office to the street.

Even longer than the drop Dobson took.

Unbidden, his mind turned back to Dobson's smirk as he jumped off the roof, preferring death to another prison term. He'd already tried to kill himself once rather than go to jail, a fact that Gerrard himself had covered up.

Mac was going to have to live with that smirk for the rest of his life.

Gerrard was right about one thing-Mac wasn't all that great at playing politics. He preferred the simplicity of the lab: you found out what happened through evidence, through facts. Politics was all about obfuscation.

He'd been lucky with the dirt he had on Gerrard. Mac had no faith that a politically motivated witch hunt would find him anything other than guilty, no matter what mind games Gerrard was playing now.

Shaking his head, he turned back toward his desk. Gerrard didn't matter. Sure, he'd be taking up residence in his rectum, as he so indelicately put it, but he'd been living there ever since Gerrard's promotion when the inspector decided to throw his weight around during the UN translator case. Gerrard being an irritant was already a given part of the equation, so Mac wasn't going to concern himself.

His job was to solve the variables.

Getting up from his desk, he called ahead to the copter pad, requesting a lift to Staten Island.